Sitt says NYC boom tale of two cities, tech migration: VIDEO

A tale of two cities is driving a booming retail, residential and office market, Joe Sitt, founder and CEO of Thor Equities, said on CNBC Tuesday.

Much of the New York boom, according to the Town Residential co-founder and chairman, is being driven by the pain felt in other markets.

“Markets like New York, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, London are doing incredibly well with tremendous demand, and then the other markets in the rest of the world are hurting, probably driven by all of the political instability,” Sitt said on the program. “You’ve got lots of foreign buyers coming into markets like New York, anywhere from the Chinese and Russians that want to hedge themselves for the future, Ukrainians and Turks that thought they were in the perfect country, that are now seeing political instability, all the way to Brazilians and Argentinians who thought they were the safe ones.”

On the local level, he added, it’s also a tale of two cities between the old generation and the new, Sitt said. With the latter, the tech sector is a major player.

Rents are booming in every space, Sitt added, as the tech migration moves into New York City’s downtown. [CNBC] — Julie Strickland